When mysticism intervenes in hostilities

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Closely connected with the subconscious, with the depths of the human psyche, mysticism sometimes brings such surprises that the hairs on the head stand on end.

Missing sailors from "St. Paul"

This story took place in 1741, during the colonization of Alaska by the Russians, and became the most mysterious in the history of the Russian fleet. Two boats with 15 experienced armed sailors, who had a cannon and signal flares, landed on the shore and … as if they fell through the ground. It is unlikely that the detachment died in a skirmish with the Indians: not a single shot was heard, and the Indians, at the sight of so many well-armed people, usually preferred to hide in the forest.

A fire was burning on the shore at night, but it is not clear who lit it. The fire was clearly not burning in accordance with the instructions given by the captain to the detachment before disembarking, and the Indians simply could not light such a large fire.

In 1774, the Spaniards sailing in these places noticed a fragment of either a bayonet or a saber that was clearly not of local origin among the Indians. In the same year, Russian merchants, stopping in a bay three hundred miles away from the landing site of the ill-fated detachment, saw white-faced and fair-haired local residents in the Indian village, from which they concluded that these could be the descendants of the disappeared Russian sailors. But, apart from these vague testimonies, nothing more definite about the missing detachment from "St. Paul" is known.

The disappearance of the Norfolk battalion

We devoted a whole article to this event. It happened in the First World War, in 1915, during the operation to seize the Dardanelles. During one of the attacks, a battalion of the Norfolk Regiment disappeared in full force.

The situation was so unusual that the commander-in-chief of the British Expeditionary Force, Sir Hamilton, wrote a report to the Secretary of War, Lord Kitchener:

267 people disappeared without a trace. To take experienced fighters in full force (not a single person returned) in the forest, where it is easy to hide, without firing a single shot, is simply fantastic. Even the Turks officially stated that they had never captured this battalion, did not engage in battle with it, and did not even suspect of its existence. Although it was just to their advantage to show how dashingly and quietly they completely destroyed the enemy battalion.

The case was so extraordinary that the British investigated it after the war, and the results of the investigation were kept secret for 50 years. However, even after the documents were declassified, the situation did not become clearer.

Later, the testimony of New Zealand veterans, who were the last to see the ill-fated British battalion, was published. They spoke of several clouds in the form of "round loaves of bread." The Norfolk approached one of the clouds "and went straight into it without hesitation." Nobody saw them again. About an hour after the soldiers disappeared into the cloud, she easily left the ground and gathered the rest of the clouds. Throughout the entire event, the clouds hung in the same place, but as soon as the thief-cloud rose to them, they all set off in a northern direction.

One Turkish peasant after the war told the British commission that he had to remove from his field many bodies of the British, which unit is unknown. He claimed that the corpses he found were "broken and, as it were, thrown from a great height."

Germans who disappeared at Amiens

In 1916, a German company defending a village in the Amiens region mysteriously disappeared on the Western Front of the First World War.

When the British launched an attack, not a single shot was fired from the enemy. Bursting into the German positions, the British did not find a single enemy soldier, while all the machine guns and guns were in their places, clothes were dried in dugouts near the stoves, food was cooked in pots. As it turned out, the German command did not know where the company had gone. This is all the more surprising, given the famous German ordnung and the positional nature of the war, in which it is almost impossible to disappear without a trace.

The disappearance of the Chinese division at Nanjing

In 1937, Japan attacked China and began to methodically smash it. By the end of the year, the Japanese approached the Yangtze River, beyond which the then Chinese capital, Nanjing, stretched. A Chinese division of 3,000 men was sent to defend one of the bridges. The soldiers dug in and prepared for enemy attacks. But the next day after the division took up positions, no one went into radio contact with the headquarters.

The situation was serious: the Japanese could launch an offensive at any moment. Officers were sent to the bridge to clarify the situation and restore communications. When they returned, they reported that the trenches and trenches were empty. At the same time, there was not a single one killed, nor any traces of the battle. The entire division simply disappeared without a trace. The soldiers could not run over to the Japanese: they would not have spared them, the Chinese knew about it.

The Japanese broke into the city across an unprotected bridge, and it all ended in the infamous Nanking Massacre, in which 300 thousand Chinese died, there was massive rape and looting.

Later, the Kuomintang, and then the Communist government that replaced it, investigated the disappearance of the division, but the conclusions of the commissions were discouraging: people simply disappeared, no traces of them were ever found.

The disappearance of the IX legion

This one of the oldest legions of Rome was created by the famous Julius Caesar for the war in Gaul and had a glorious military history, fighting in different parts of the Roman Empire. And suddenly, in the II century A. D. e. the legion has disappeared. The year and place of his disappearance are unknown. There are three versions, the geographical and temporal range of which is impressive. This could have happened in the 120s in the north of Britain, during a large-scale invasion of the Picts (the ancestors of the modern Scots). After that, the famous Hadrian's Wall was created, separating the Roman part of Britain from the barbarian.

Or it happened in the 130s in Judea, during a major uprising of Bar Kokhba, after which Jerusalem was destroyed, and the Roman colony of Elia Capitolina was founded on its ruins. Or it could have happened in the 160s in Armenia, during the Parthian War, when an unidentified legion was destroyed. In any case, in the list of legions compiled under the emperor Marcus Aurelius in 165, this unit was no longer listed.

I must say that the Roman legion was a powerful force, its destruction was an extraordinary event and was pretty well recorded in the sources. The more mysterious seems to be the disappearance of the IX Legion without a trace, accompanied by the absolute silence of the sources.